mgo.licio.us

"The face of the operation is Briatore (referred to exclusively in the film by his colleagues and angry, chanting detractors as "Flavio"), an anthropomorphic radish who spends most of his time at QPR plotting to fire all of the managers."

At press time, Harbaugh had sent Michigan’s athletic department an envelope containing a heavily annotated seating chart, a list of the 63,000 seat views he had found unsatisfactory, and a glowing 70-page report on section 25, row 12, seat 9, which he claimed is “exactly what the great sport of football is all about.”

Unverified Voracity Shoots Gary Sinese

Huh. Tom Dienhart's taken his "get anonymous coaches to say bitchy stuff" act on to Rivals, this time breaking down the pending SEC championship game. You probably don't care much about the particulars, but I found this section pretty interesting given that much-loved former Michigan QB coach Scot Loeffler was just put in charge of the Tebow Child:

QUARTERBACK: Our staff thought Tim Tebow has gotten worse as a quarterback from last year to this year. Everyone talks about his mechanics and dropping the football; he drops it lower this year and has worse mechanics. I don't know what it is. He's still making throws and doing some things, but he just doesn't seem comfortable back there. I don't know if it's because of the concussion or what. But teams are making him sit in the pocket longer and throw the football, and sometimes he gets a little skittish back there.

Probably doesn't mean much given Loeffler's extended, wildly successful tenure at Michigan, but I found it interesting.

Is that your final answer? The internet would be a far less chaotic and rumor-stricken place if folks followed one guideline when citing inside information: never link to a place for the first time, or link to a place you've never heard of, because it's got a hot rumor.

Brian Kelly will be next Notre Dame football coach

Cincinnati coach to take helm of Fighting Irish, sources reveal to IrishCentral

By SEAN O' SHEA, IrishCentral.com Staff Writer

IrishCentral.com? Good enough for the Detroit News—which describes this site like so: "IrishCentral.com says it is a Web site devoted to the "global Irish community"—and Cleveland Plain Dealer, amongst a bunch of other sites. There's only one problem:

Brian Kelly will be the next head football coach at the University of Notre Dame, informed sources tell IrishCentral.

The source, who is a well-informed person of influence at Notre Dame, says the Cincinnati coach is the preferred choice for the job, and that he is expected to eventually sign a deal.

Kelly is expected to see out the season with his Bowl Championship Series-bound team, and then report for duty at South Bend.

There is no there there. Kelly is "expected" to "eventually" be the coach by some random guy. By this standard, Michigan is currently coached by Kirk Ferentz, Greg Schiano, and Rich Rodriguez. This site has no track record—it started in March. It talked to one guy who says Kelly is the eventual choice in a month, which in coaching search years is sometime after the Sun engulfs the Earth. And it spreads like wildfire. Why this dubious rumor and not others? Other than the newspaper website template—a rinky-dink version of one—I got nothin'.

Kelly, for his part, was less wishy-washy about staying at Cincinnati on the radio than he was at a press conference yesterday:

“I’m staying, man. I’m staying,” Kelly said on the show. “Why would I go? It’s always about staying, first. First and foremost."

MVictors: When you say ‘send in’, do you submit an online form or do you email something in like a Word document or a spreadsheet or something? Angelique: I just send in an email, ranking the teams 1-25. I have a couple different email addresses that I send it to and that’s what I’ve always done. You’d think it’d be more formal, wouldn’t you?

Wow. The Blogpoll's rickety submission system is more advanced than this. There's javascript and a database and everything.

PREWB! Yes, obligated to mention that after unusual stonewalling on the part of the local police department, eight Spartans were "indefinitely" suspended, including starters BJ Cunningham, Mark Dell, and Chris Rucker for the 2009 Posse Roundup & Engineer/Woman Beatdown. Rucker's a cornerback and in the state of Michigan all members of the secondary not named Woolfolk or Warren are interchangeably horrible, but Cunningham and Dell are excellent receivers. BONUS: there are five more guys yet to be identified—Rob Parker thinks they're all Kirk Cousins.

KJ at The Only Colors wants everyone gone permanently, but that seems steep if the kids in question didn't get violent themselves. They might have tagged along for laughs and saw Glenn Winston go all Grimsrud on them (clip NSF kiddies):

Mark Dell might just have some mechanical engineer's brain all over his car. While you have to expect that when you go anywhere with Winston, I guess, anyone without a prior incident shouldn't necessarily see their career end if the tape shows them to be largely innocent. Hefty suspensions lasting past the Michigan game next year are mandatory, though.

The thing about this thing is: I thought that giving Winston the relative slap on the wrist (essentially a four-game suspension) he got for an act far worse than many that see players drummed out of school entirely—see poor Larry Harrison—was a mistake at the time, as did a lot of other people including Spartan fans. If you want to give Dantonio the benefit of the doubt, fine. Coaches have a lot more information in these situations than we do. I find the irony of his pride before the fall delicious, though, and reserve the right to whoop it up after two years in which Michigan's coach has been portrayed as an inbred hick with no ethics.

I have nothing against the guy and don't blame him for the hype around him, but he often looks least comfortable doing what the pros ask you to do most: sit in the pocket and make reads. It will be really interesting to watch what he does in the NFL. I could see him being pretty bad. I hope I'm wrong. The NFL could use some non-cookie-cutter players, IMO.

In 2007, Michigan had 7 players drafted, not 6 as Rivals has listed.
Also, if you count Pierre Woods playing a bunch for the Pats, then 12 of our 19 players drafted in the past 4 years have seen pretty significant playing time (appeared in most of their teams' games and put up decent or better stats, according to ESPN).
Not that bad.

Loeffler may in fact be overrated. He was our QB coach from 2002-07. The only UM QBs he personally coached were upperclass Navarre, Henne, and freshman Mallett. Who's to say another coach couldn't have gotten them to perform the same way?

At least in his stint at UM. Not sure what he did before, but it fits in my model of the world that he would do little other than let Tebow's bad mechanical habits come home to roost.

See 'Navarre primary target stare-downs'* and Henne days of random accuracy... ok... Henne's is a little more nuanced issue, but the point is, Henne never got better at dealing with his achilles heel, just like Navarre never did.

A good QB coach would have been trying to address those major weaknesses from day one, but as a fan, I never got the sense that they were ever acknowledged by the Loeffler or any others on the coaching staff.

Perhaps they were, but it never showed.

*As coined by me all those years ago in terms far more conducive to drunken incredulity